The present embodiment relates generally to an interactive education system for teaching patient care, and more particularly to such a system having virtual instruments for use in conducting patient care activity on a patient simulator.
While it is desirable to train students in patient care protocols before allowing contact with real patients, textbooks and flash cards lack the important benefit to students attained from xe2x80x9chands-onxe2x80x9d practice. Thus, patient care education has often been taught using devices, such as a manikin configured to simulate a patient, along with corresponding medical instruments to perform patient care activity. However, one disadvantage of such a system is that medical instruments are often prohibitively expensive, and consequently, many users must settle for using a smaller variety of instruments, even at the cost of a less comprehensive educational experience. One solution to the foregoing problem is using a set of relatively inexpensive, simulated medical instruments (xe2x80x9cvirtualxe2x80x9d instruments), as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 5,853,292, the entire disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Another problem in patient care education is teaching a user to locate and interpret certain patient body sounds. Charts or displays of audible locations are of little practical value, for they do not provide the user with some form of realistic feedback, such as audio, visual, or tactile responses to the user""s activity. For example, knowing that an apex heart sound is heard at the fifth intercostal space along the midclavicular line is a very different matter from actually finding the location and recognizing the sound on a patient. In an attempt to provide a more realistic experience, prior methods have disposed speakers playing body sounds at locations throughout a manikin, but this is undesirable, as speakers have a tendency to reverberate throughout the manikin, thus allowing an unnatural juxtaposition of normally distal sounds. Moreover, even if only one sound is played at a time, the nature of a speaker results in the sound being heard over a wider anatomical area than would be found in a real patient, thus reinforcing sloppy sound location and detection by the user.
Therefore, what is needed is an interactive education system using virtual instruments, such as a virtual stethoscope, in cooperation with simulated patient treatment for rewarding the user with realistic audible, and in some cases, visual feedback, thereby enabling a user to learn comprehensive patient care skills.
The present embodiment, accordingly, provides an interactive education system for teaching patient care to a user. The system comprises a patient simulator, as well as a virtual instrument for use with the patient simulator in performing patient care activities. The systems also includes means for sensing an interaction between the virtual instrument and the simulator, and means for providing feedback to the user regarding the interaction between the virtual instrument and the simulator.
One advantage of the present embodiment is that it provides an interactive education system using virtual instruments in cooperation with simulated patient treatment for rewarding the user with realistic audible, and in some cases, visual feedback, thereby enabling a user to learn comprehensive patient care skills.